Friday, May 3, 2013

Open Letter to Rep. Doug LaMalfa on Guantanamo Bay

Dear Congressman LaMalfa,

As you are undoubtedly aware, conditions
at the United States’ prison at Guantanamo Bay have been deteriorating
precipitately in recent weeks.A large
number of detainees, many of them who have been held without charge for years—some
for over a decade—have undertaken a hunger strike.They are being force-fed, and shots have been
fired at the prison.

This disintegration of order at the
prison is probably inevitable at an institution based on such a shaky legal and
demonstrably immoral basis: forced disappearance and extraordinary rendition;
torture and detention without trial.Our
President made a commendable if perhaps ill-planned effort to close the base
shortly after his election in 2008, but was stymied by members of Congress and by
his own inconsistency and hypocrisy.

In the wake of
condemnation by a UN Human Rights body, President Obama described
Guantanamo as “not something that’s in the best interest of the American
people...it’s not sustainable”.I can
only hope that his renewed effort to close the prison will have greater success
than before.

One key reason why his earlier effort stalled
had to do with opposition from national security chicken hawks, largely in the
Republican Party but counting more than a few Democrats amongst their number,
who attacked the President for being “soft on terror” and sought to persuade
the public that closing Guantanamo would put our country in greater danger.

On the basis of the character of the
facility at Guantanamo and current events, your party’s ill-judged obstinacy (a
charge that could equally apply to many NIMBYs in the Democratic Party) is in
danger of turning our country’s behaviour and character into a byword for
injustice and barbarism.

Moreover, the refusal to subject these
and other people to our legal system undermines faith in that system and
suggests that you and your colleagues believe that our institutions—good enough
to deal with domestic criminals who have committed crimes as bad as if not
worse than some of those alleged against people held at Guantanamo—are inadequate
to the task of balancing justice and public safety.

In supporting the maintenance of the
prison at Guantanamo, which for many people in the United States and around the
world represents a litany of abuses meted out by our national security state,
and some of the most serious underlying and unaddressed flaws of our approach
to international relations and public safety, our representatives are giving comfort
and recruiting propaganda to those who would attack our country.

The greatest long-term threat to our
country does not take the form of any individual “terrorist” organisation or
the ambitions of individuals or groups to attack the United States.It is, rather, our own hubristic policies—driven
by the internal logic of a profiteering and criminalistic military-industrial
complex—and our government’s adoption of the tools of terror, which are in
danger of committing us to a war without either end or purpose.

A
recent poll suggested that three quarters of Americans believe that “acts
of terrorism will be a part of life in the future”.That is tragic on so many levels.It is deplorable that the public has come to
believe that living a fearful, war-torn life is necessary and unavoidable.It is a testament to the stunted imaginations
of our policymakers that meeting terror with war and more terror is the best
solution they can think of to a set of political and economic problems in the
world.

I urge you to take this opportunity to
demonstrate leadership by working with your colleagues on both sides of the
aisle to change the terms of the debate about our national security, to
recommit our government to respect for our justice system and for human rights,
and to support the President’s efforts to close Guantanamo Bay—one of the most
egregious symbols of our mismanaged relations with not only our conscience but
with global civil society.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.